The web browser has been the dominant thin client, now rich client, for almost two decades, but can it compete with a new thin client that makes better technical choices and avoids the glacial standards process? I don't think so, as the current web technology stack of HTML/Javascript/Flash has accumulated so many bad decisions over the years that it's ripe for a clean sheet redesign to wipe it out.

I think every platform that evolves and adapts will be very hard to beat/replace. And it seems open standards and platforms are inherently better at this than some grand brainchild of some company/single developer.

But there are some use cases where HTML/JS won't work well that is why Google is working on native client.